Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".
Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"
And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".
Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.
At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.
So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!
Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!
Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!
Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.
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as an indian person, my favourite thing is seeing what people who aren't from here have done with my food; i'll go to an indian restaurant in a random corner of the world and they're putting oregano in their palak paneer or a balsamic wash on their naan and it's like "yes good tell me how you folded your culture into mine and came out with something new and lovely, we're holding hands across oceans bestie"
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Come watch dungeon meshi we have a (seemingly) typical white autistic man who doesn't understand social norms, an autistic man of colour who overcompensates for social deficits by being too good at social norms (while still struggling socially), and we even have the "grew up autistic but also Asian so I have a very good understanding of cultural and social norms but I still struggle socially" variety of autistic man.
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As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.
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pathologic but it's a lost 1920s german expressionist film [id under cut]
[id:
image 1: a digital drawing of a fake poster, using bright colours and rough, painterly brushstrokes. the title, 'pest' (german for 'plague'), is written at the top in spiky black text. in the foreground a man dressed as a tragedian is staring intently at the viewer, his hands raised and splayed as if in horror. in the background, the town is framed against a red sky, with the polyhedron in yellow behind.
images 2 and 3: fake casting sheets for the film, with the names of the actors and the characters they are playing above a black-and-white portrait photograph of them. all the text is in german. in english it reads:
'Pest', a film by Robert Wiene
Alfred Abel as Victor Kain
Ernst Busch as Grief
Lil Dagover as Katerina Saburova
Ernst Deutsch as the Bachelor
Carl de Vogt as Vlad the Younger
Marlene Dietrich as the Inquisitor
Willy Fritsch as Mark Immortell
Alexander Granach as Andrey and Peter Stamatin
Bernhard Goetzke as General Block
Dolly Haas as the Changeling
Ludwig Hartau as the Haruspex
Brigitte Helm as Anna Angel
Brigitte Horney as Maria Kaina
Emil Jannings as Big Vlad
Gerda Maurus as Yulia Lyuricheva
Lothar Menhert as Georgiy Kain
Asta Nielsen as Lara Ravel
Ossi Oswalda as Eva Yan
Fritz Rasp as Stanislas Rubin
Conrad Veidt as Alexander Saburov and Tragedian
Paul Wegener as Oyun
Gertrud Welcker as Aspity
image 4: four digital sketches of set designs for various locations. all are strongly influenced by expressionist imagery, using extreme angles, warped perspective, and dramatic shapes. they are labelled 'street 1' (a street lined with houses), 'street 2' (a square with a lamppost and a set of steps), 'polyhedron exterior' (the polyhedron walkway), and 'cathedral interior' (the dais at the far end of the cathedral).
image 5: four digital drawings in a black-and-white watercolour style, showing fake stills from the film. all are similarly distorted and lit by dramatic lighting. the first shows katerina's bedroom, with katerina standing in the centre of the floor. the second shows the interior of an infected house. the third shows daniil staring out of the frame in horror, one hand on his head and the other raised as if to ward something off. the fourth shows an intertitle with jagged white text reading 'the first day' against a dark background.
end id.]
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I see your increasingly eldritch ghost form for Danny, and I raise you:
Phantom who, instead of looking more ghostly, is just a little too much like a human.
Like yeah, everyone knows Danny Fenton can send literal chills up people's spines and they swear they've seen his eyes start to glow in the right light, but have you seen Phantom? Like why isn't his skin green or blue or even deathly white? It's a lot healthier looking than Fenton's, that's for sure.
And just about every ghost that comes through has crazy sharp fangs, but if anything, Phantom's canines are just a little sharper than normal, but really they don't look too different than Wes' when he's on one of his rage induced rants.
Not to mention the physical presence he has in Amity Park. The way he inhabits space just feels different than most other ghosts, as if Phantom is somehow more connected to the physical world. Like why is he opening doors when he can just phase through them?
Kat, who works the after school shifts at the Nasty Burger with Valerie, swears up and down that she's seen him sitting on the roof, eating two or three burgers at a time (and sharing his fries with the little blob ghost family that lives in the dumpsters).
Dale knows for a fact he's seen Phantom talking on a cell phone of all things with someone. Even claims he heard Phantom mention something about playing DOOMED.
Mrs. Greigerit, the tiny old lady who's cashiered at the grocery store since forever, loves to talk about the time Phantom grabbed a few first aid supplies off the shelves after a ghost attack to help a woman and her toddler patch up until EMS arrived. According to her, he knew exactly how to work with these things meant to heal humans, and he even left a crumpled handful of human cash on her counter to pay for the supplies before he disappeared.
Amity Park notices, just like they notice the strangeness that surrounds Danny Fenton. But really, maybe it's just AP weirdness finally rubbing off on Phantom.
Everyone brushes it off until Jack and Maddie Fenton do the unthinkable and offer their help to Phantom after a particularly nasty fight.
"We saw him there, and... we saw just another person who needed help," Jack tells Tiffany Snow later that day. "A kid who could've been going to school with mine. What else were we supposed to do?"
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